Investigations of blockchain technology for anti-doping data management

Doping is a well-known problem in competitive sports. Along the years, multiple cases were unveiled to the public, causing indignation and undermining trust in current systems, processes, and organisational practices to prevent, identify and combat doping. Moreover, it became evident that some of these cases were the result of sophisticated collusive and corruptive strategies involving multiple individuals from within the sports environment.

Anti-doping organisations and sports authorities are expected to cooperate in the fight against doping, their goal is to guarantee the fair-play in all sport modalities and prevent public health issues. To accomplish this mission, major organisations have agreed on a series of measures that need to be harmonised globally. However, extensive literature on the topic indicates that effective, secure, and collaborative processes haven’t been achieved yet.

One of the dimensions of the doping problem, as investigated in this research, is the need to produce, store, access and share doping-related data in a secure, tamperproof, and privacy-preserving manner. This research focuses on the processes and tools established by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) for the global harmonisation of doping control activities. From this investigation it is possible to understand that there are inherent conflicts of interest and weak trust protocols put in place, in part due to a centralised data management paradigm and to the lack of fully digitalised processes. Therefore, this research aims to conceptualise a multiorganizational, decentralised, distributed data governance model and re-design one of the most sensitive processes within the doping control environment, demonstrating that the adoption of a permissioned Blockchain can greatly benefit the whole doping control community.